


Hindsight

by tansypool



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/F, She just doesn't know it yet, and the second is very much one-sided, but they're both relevant here, the first relationship is mentioned only in passing, yasmin is gay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-21
Updated: 2018-10-21
Packaged: 2019-08-05 09:53:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16365653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tansypool/pseuds/tansypool
Summary: Yasmin wasn't expecting "exciting" to fall from the sky.





	Hindsight

Yaz had never thought about it through school – her friends would ask who she had a crush on, and she never quite had an answer. She said Peter, who had loaned her a pen when hers ran out of ink; she said Blake, because everybody else said him too. Not that she would want anything to do with them – but they seemed like safe answers, the least off-putting, options that wouldn’t be questioned, and the conversation always did move on.

She never thought of other answers, never even contemplated them as answers. She was ridiculously nervous around her English teacher, butterflies and all – but isn’t that how everybody feels? Not that she would ask that, of course.

But it’s all in the back of her mind. Only a few of her friends are dating, it’s not like she’s missing anything. Instead, she focuses on getting As and A*s, breezes through the recruitment process for the police, and spends her time as a probationary officer going above and beyond. She’ll take the praise as it comes – and she’s _good_ , so that’s often – but it brings back that fluttering nervousness when it comes from one particular sergeant, who is barely over five feet tall but can make grown men cower when she’s angry.

She wants to do _more_ , keep focusing on her career and not the boys she assumes she’ll fall in love with later. So she begs for something strange, something exciting. She wasn’t expecting “exciting” to quite literally fall from the sky.

She wasn’t expecting “exciting” to lead to four deaths in a few hours; she wasn’t expecting a fifth death to crop up, in the exact same pattern. She isn’t surprised when somebody else takes charge on those deaths – she’s a witness, not an investigator, and she struggles to keep her hands from shaking whenever she speaks about Ryan’s nan.

And the woman who fell from the sky stays.

She says she still doesn’t know where she needs to go.

In the end, before she goes to the endless reaches of time and space, the Doctor should probably go somewhere that sells clothes before her own outfit turns into rags while she wears it. And that’s how Yaz thinks of it, ignores her own heart rate every time the Doctor smiles, makes what should just be a friendly suggestion, one that they’re all thinking.

And then Ryan ribs her mercilessly for the rest of the evening for a sentence that had come out instead – “You really need to get out of those clothes.” She’d meant it politely, but that doesn’t change that she had felt her cheeks flush, had changed the topic of conversation. Or that Ryan had decided to stick to that particular sentence, but she supposes it’s worth it, if it makes him feel better while everything else is going on.

It doesn’t change the fact that she keeps mulling over those words in her mind, eyes wired open in the middle of the night. It won’t make the uneasy feeling of having to say goodbye in the morning go away.

But then they don’t say goodbye.

And honestly, if she has to be stranded on an alien planet with anybody, it would be the Doctor. The moment she had opened her eyes after the airless void of space, she had seen the Doctor’s face, and had thought, _Maybe it’ll be fine_.

They race across an endless desert, and step into a ship that shouldn’t be, and it is fine, for the moment. The Doctor takes them home, on a route far longer than it should have been, and they decide not to stay there, having seen what there is beyond.

Yaz doesn’t think much of the nerves that haven’t left her for a time she couldn’t define – it feels like a few weeks, but their days don’t have lengths any more, and what they call an evening is just the time before they sleep. But she steps into the library onboard, late one so-called evening, and finds the Doctor alone, sat with one leg hooked over the armrest of her chair, staring at a book on 51st century artificial planets. There’s a jolt that pulls at Yaz, tells her to leave, but her presence has already been noticed.

She hadn’t planned on company – given these unnamed nerves, there’s nothing Yaz would rather do less and more simultaneously than be alone with the Doctor, let alone in a moment of peace, floating outside of time. Naturally, she hadn’t planned on a conversation, either.

“What are you reading?” She pretends that she hadn’t glanced at the title, in the split second before the Doctor had stopped chewing on the end of a pen to look up.

The Doctor seems to skip half the conversation in her head. “There’s a library, only it’s barely that any more, just shelves of books you can’t read and a mainframe you can’t get to.”

“And you want to—to find how to get there?”

“Sort of, not really, bit different. I never went there before it closed down, was wondering if there was a way to access the mainframe offsite. Seems like there should be, it had every book in the known universe, but humanity has never been good with backing up their data.”

But her face isn’t one of pure curiosity, of interest in a book lost to time. There’s another dozen books stacked next to her chair, but the spines are facing away from Yaz, and there’s a notebook with an untidy smattering of circles obscuring the cover of the book at the top.

Yaz feels like she shouldn’t pry, but it’s second nature by now. “Why do you want to do this, then?”

The Doctor pauses for a moment, as though she’s thinking about what to say, and barely speaks above a whisper when she answers: “My wife died for me there, before I even knew her.”

It isn’t the answer Yaz was expecting, or one that makes much sense.

The Doctor doesn’t speak any louder, but she speaks quickly, gesturing with the chewed-on end of her pen. “I saved her, sort of. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but she’d hate it, wouldn’t find it nearly exciting enough, no trouble to be gotten into. Stuck doing time normally, all straight-forward and linear and boring. I didn’t know her, didn’t think it would be how it was, except my friend told me after about what it was like in there, and I sort of just didn’t want to think about it, and I wouldn’t have again, except, well, I’m probably not going to see her again, and I hate thinking about her stuck there like that.”

Yaz doesn’t know what to say, doesn’t know where to begin, but she’s not given a chance as the Doctor continues. “I don’t even know if I can do anything. But if I can, I will, properly, this time.” She leans over, digs through the pile of books and sends half of them toppling, and hands Yaz a book on archaeology, by a Professor River Song. “I think you’d have liked her.”

Yaz doesn’t want to pry any further than she already has, and the Doctor returns to her own book, occasionally scribbling circles in her notes. So she starts reading, an introduction to a history far off in the future, in the words of the wife of the woman she might be in love with—

Oh, so _that’s_ what that feeling is.

**Author's Note:**

> This is dedicated to everyone who realised they were not straight a bit later on, and for whom hindsight is 20/20.
> 
> It's also dedicated to everyone currently putting off their uni work, because I definitely did this instead of an essay.
> 
> (Sometimes, I just have to aggressively project my own experiences onto a fictional character that we're still learning about.)
> 
> I've now also got a follow-on of sorts called [perchance to dream](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16716478/chapters/39206408) if you're at all interested.


End file.
